Franz Kafka Would Have Made a Fine Sports Journalist for India

India
Uncut, Asia Wall Street
Journal

 

India
Doesn’t Need Olympic Pride

A shorter version of this piece was published in Friday’s edition of The Wall Street Journal
Asia.
It was a gunshot heard across a subcontinent. On Monday, Abhinav Bindra, a
25-year-old shooter from India,
took aim for his final shot in the 10-meter air rifle event at the Olympic
Games. The pressure was intense, but Mr Bindra shot an almost-perfect 10.8 to
win the gold medal. His fans and supporters jumped up in delight in the stands,
as wild celebrations began across the country. India’s 24-hour news channels
became 24-hour Bindra channels, and there was much talk of national pride.
Mr Bindra’s achievement warrants such celebration. On a national level, this
was, astonishingly, the first gold medal India has won in an individual sport
in any Olympics. And on the more important personal level, it was a testament
to the years of single-minded hard work Mr Bindra dedicated to his sport. Not
surprisingly, the government immediately took credit for his achievement.
India’s
sports minister, Manohar Singh Gill, came on television and said, “I
congratulate myself and every other Indian.” But while India’s
shooting association is better than most of the bodies that run sport in the
country, it was Mr Bindra’s family that enabled his success. Mr Bindra was
lucky that his father is an industrialist who dipped into his personal wealth
to support his son. He built a shooting range for Abhinav in his farmhouse in
Punjab, and made sure he never ran out of ammunition, which is not made in India and has
to be imported.
India and China are
studies in contrast. The full might of the Chinese state goes into creating
sportspeople who will bring it pride. The Indian government, on the other hand,
does a pathetic job of administering sports in the country. Rent-seeking
bureaucrats run the various sporting federations – or ruin them, as some would
say. A great illustration of this is hockey, a sport once dominated by India, which
failed to qualify for Bejing. Even though there is no Indian hockey team at these
Olympics, four hockey coaches have duly made their way to Beijing. Franz Kafka would feel at home as an
Indian sports journalist today.
Most of India’s
finest sportspeople are self-made athletes who owe nothing to the system –
Viswanathan Anand, the world chess champion, is a case in point. The sport
where India
has been most successful, cricket, is not administered by the government.
Surely, nationalists would argue, there is a case to be made for pumping more
money into our sport.
Such arguments are wrong. India’s
leaders need to have a clear sense of priorities, and there are two things they
would do well to consider. One, despite the gains sections of our economy have
made since the liberalization of 1991, India remains a desperately poor
country. Two, unlike China, India is
democratic, and its government thus carries a certain responsibility towards
its people, and the taxes it collects from them.
Any money that the government spends on sport could be better spent on
building infrastructure: roads, ports, power-generating units etc. It would
also do a lot of good simply left in the hand of the taxpayers, who would then
spend it according to their own individual priorities. Hundreds of millions of
Indians are forced to part with their hard-earned money through direct or
indirect taxes, and it is perverse if that money is spent towards something as
nebulous as an outdated notion of national pride.
For too long now, India
has been an insecure nation craving validation from the West. Even many of us
who speak of India
as a future superpower have one ear cocked towards the west, straining to hear
similar forecasts in a foreign accent, ignoring the condescension that such
pronouncements sometimes carry. Similarly, we look to the sporting arena for
affirmation of our self-worth. That attitude might have been understandable
during the days of the cold war – but it no longer is.
Sport is a zero-sum game – for one nation to win, another must lose. But
real life is non-zero-sum, and nothing demonstrates the win-win game of life as
well as globalisation, with nations (and individuals) trading with each other
to mutual benefit. In these times, it is clear we do not need Olympic medals to
be a great nation, but economic progress that all Indians have access to. It is
beyond the scope of this piece to spell out the many reforms that are needed
for that happen – but spending taxpayers’ money responsibly is a key part of
the puzzle.
I shall go against the prevailing wisdom, then, and say that I don’t mind if
our government spends less money on sport, or even none. Where will our Olympic
medals come from then, you ask (as if the last few decades have brought us a
slew of them). Well, lift enough people to prosperity, and the sporting laurels
will roll in. Ask Abhinav Bindra.

Posted by Amit Varma in Economics | Essays
and Op-Eds | India | Old
memes | Taxes | Sport